Make it Easy to Write: Using James Clear’s Atomic Habits to Reduce the Friction of Establishing a Good Habit

My Christmas present to myself was a subscription to Masterclass. Here is a little window into my world: I love to watch The Handsome podcast (Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster, & Mae Martin) on YouTube while I work out, and I have found myself very susceptible to anything they advertise (Masterclass being one of those things)! Anyway, I bought myself this subscription, and then—maybe you can relate to this—I didn’t really use it much for a few months. However, I realized a couple of weeks ago that my yearlong access was slipping away, so I decided to lower the bar on how I watched the classes in order to make sure I watched them at all. Maybe you can relate to that too.

What is that saying? Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good? My ideal vision for how I was going to experience these classes was that I would sit down, completely uninterrupted, take copious notes on each class, and therefore be able to really learn each one. The end result was that I had set the bar so high that the perfect time to watch never arrived and thus I didn’t watch at all. I never even pressed play on the first video.

In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, I decided to let go of the expectation that I would take notes on every video and instead pair watching Masterclass with working out, which is something I already do a few times per week. So, instead of watching The Handsome or Good Hang with Amy Poehler (my two favorites), I now sometimes watch Masterclass while I work out and I don’t take notes, I just listen.

And I’ve had some success! In the last few weeks, I’ve finished classes by Margaret Atwood and James Clear. All of this brings me to what I wanted to talk about today because I think it’s very relevant to writers. James Clear, who wrote the book Atomic Habits, shares a basic principle for shaping your habits: if you want to curtail a bad habit, introduce friction to make that habit harder to do. Conversely, if you want to cultivate a good habit, make it as easy as possible to do.

How does this apply to writing? Well, for many of us, the writing time we do have gets diminished by constant distractions. Maybe we’re working from home and we see that the laundry is piling up so we think that if we just throw in a quick load we’ll get our day off to a good start, but then that one task leads to another and, 25 minutes later, we’re still tidying up the kitchen and the first chunk of our writing time is gone. Or maybe we do sit down to write on time, but our attention keeps getting interrupted by constant pings on our phone or a compulsion to keep flipping over to our email inboxes to see if anything new has come in.

What to try:

There are some things we can do about this. A major one Clear talks about is actually leaving your phone in another room while you work—in his example, the “friction” is having to get up and walk down the hall to retrieve the phone. It doesn’t sound like much effort, and of course it isn’t, but it’s often enough to interrupt the habit of mindlessly checking (and then perhaps getting sucked in by some notification or other). If you have children, like I do, you probably can’t do this exactly. What if the school calls saying they’re sick? This is where I’ve had some luck putting my phone into “Do Not Disturb” mode but allowing calls from certain phone numbers to come through.

The principle of “reducing friction” is also why I encourage clients to decide as much as possible before they sit down to write (ideally even the day before, so they can prep what they need). Our brains don’t like uncertainty, so it’s best to placate them by stabilizing as many variables as possible ahead of time.

Before a writing session, decide:

• When is it going to happen? (Schedule it and put it in your calendar. Treat it like it’s an appointment with someone else: Get there on time and don’t cancel it.)

• Where will you work? 

• What materials do you need? (Pull them out and organize them neatly somewhere you can see them. If they’re electronic, open the file so it’s the first thing you see when you wake up your computer.)

You can also try the technique of giving yourself an assignment for the session. This isn’t to say that you can’t pivot once you get going, but it helps to give yourself a starting point—a way into the writing. The night before, write your assignment on a Post-It, and place it on your keyboard. If you have a concrete starting point, your brain won’t fight you as much. You already know what you’re supposed to be doing; you’ve taken the uncertainty out of it.

We all struggle to get our writing done. It’s striking that something so central to academic life—producing clear prose to disseminate creative intellectual work—tends to get the least of our time, as it gets pushed to the margins of already busy days. That’s why I liked this idea from James Clear’s Masterclass: reduce the friction on good habits (the ones you’re trying to cultivate) to make it easier to get a win.

Assignment:

• How can you make it easier to write?

• What “variables” can you decide ahead of time to reduce the friction between “wanting to write” and actually writing?

• What would a “quick win” look like for you in the realm of establishing a writing practice? (Said another way: can you make this habit so easy that it’s impossible to fail? The five minutes of writing that you do is better than the perfect two-hour session that never gets started.)

Extra Tidbits

What I’m reading: I succumbed to all of the chatter about Lindy West’s new memoir Adult Braces. I picked that up and couldn’t put it down, so now I’m reading Shrill for some background context. She is very funny. I also couldn’t stop thinking about Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which I originally read when I was in college. There were some parts I sort of vaguely remembered and now that I live in the South I figured I’d read it again. 

What I’m eating: I haven’t eaten this yet, but I am craving a BLT sandwich on sourdough bread with fresh mozzarella. I have procured everything except for the bread, so now it’s just a matter of time!

What I’m watching: My whole family is into All Creatures Great and Small on PBS. We’re currently on season 6 (the last season so far – wah!) and I don’t want it to end.

Image by Susanna Marsiglia via Unsplash

Alt text: A woman sits at her desk in a darkened room typing into her laptop.